I know of several good Russian makers, but none of them are well known (or even
known at all) in the West because the Soviet Union made it nearly impossible to
export the instruments (and it's still expensive - export duties are
ridiculous). So it's a bit hard, from the Western perspective, to understand
whether there actually was a school, and even harder - unless you have a lot of
exposure to those instruments, i.e. you spend a lot of time in Russia - to judge
the quality of those instruments.

As for the quality of the strings, the arts were generally well supported in
Soviet Russia, but even if that didn't extend to the manufacture and/or import
of good strings, the musicians at the time would certainly stock up while on
tour. And if they were forced to obtain strings that way, I would suspect that
they would prefer metal strings to gut, because metal lasts longer... I can say
that in the 1990s it was possible to buy decent Russian-made strings in Russia,
although they weren't always easy to find.

--- In viola@yahoogroups.com, luis claudio manfio <lmanfio@...> wrote:
>
> Most probably your instrument was strung with gut strings when it was made.
> I wonder
> about the quality of the strings because iin 1939 Russia was a Comunist
> country, closed
> to the good strings made in western Europe.
> It's interesting that Russia developed quite a lot in string playing and
> teaching, but was not
> able to develop a good violin making school.
> www.manfio.com